Synopsis
The Flowers of War (2011) is Zhang Yimou's wartime drama starring Christian Bale, available to watch online on iFILM. As Japanese troops overrun Nanjing in the winter of 1937, a battered cathedral fills with people who have nowhere left to run.
John Miller came to the city to bury a priest and ends up stranded inside the besieged church, the only grown man among a crowd of terrified strangers. Under one roof are the convent school's young students and a group of women from the brothel down the street, two worlds that want nothing to do with each other. To shield them, the drunken mortician pulls on the dead priest's cassock and passes himself off as clergy when soldiers come knocking. Then officers demand the schoolgirls be sent to "sing" at a celebration, and the courtesans make a choice the film never lets you forget.
Made for the seventieth anniversary of the massacre and adapted from Yan Geling's novel, it was one of the most expensive Chinese productions of its time and China's official Oscar submission. Cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding floods the ruins with stained-glass color until beauty and horror press in together. Heavy going, but it earns it. Stream The Flowers of War (2011) online on iFILM.
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